


you understand they've got a plan for us

by starlight_sugar



Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Post-Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-30 06:05:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15745779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlight_sugar/pseuds/starlight_sugar
Summary: “Kashmir,” Benji says, and his shoulders tense a little. “Jane-”“Bar rules,” she reminds him, and he sighs, like he somehow hadn’t guessed that she’d invoke bar rules.





	you understand they've got a plan for us

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fanwork not at all affiliated with the M:I franchise. The title comes from [Dangerous](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpQArtCeXTk) by Big Data.
> 
> This fic was written for the prompt "unexpected friendship" on my Trope Bingo Round 11 card.
> 
> This takes a few weeks after Fallout. There are spoilers. Tread with caution.

“How’s the field?”

“Eh, you know. How’s training?”

“Same as always.”

“Of course,” Benji snorts. He takes a drink of his beer and lets the bottle dangle in his hand. “No great students?”

“Not yet,” Jane admits. “But there aren’t always a ton.”

“That’s reassuring,” he mutters. The bottle swings back and forth. “You can ask about it, you know.”

“Would you answer?”

“Only if you actually asked.”

It took Jane about sixty seconds to realize that Benji is trying to hide his neck from her. It’d be one thing if it were the popped collar on his flannel, or his jacket, or the scarf he’s wearing even though it’s sweltering in the bar they’ve chosen, but all three at once is a sign that he’s hiding something, or at least that he’s desperately trying.

She’s already certain that she won’t like the story - nobody is completely sure what happened in Kashmir, other than Hunley not coming back and Ethan coming back looking like absolute shit. It seemed like a narrowly-averted crisis, the kind that Ethan and his team always specialized in, the kind that Jane could only handle for so long before stepping out of the field to train new agents. She’s always suspected that Benji could handle a lot of crises, but this seems… different.

Benji takes a sip of his beer, sets the botte down, and looks at her expectantly. Jane would smile if she weren’t suddenly full of dread. “Your neck,” she says quietly.

“Kashmir,” he answers, which isn’t exactly a surprise. She tries to convey that by arching her eyebrow and drinking some of her own beer, and his shoulders tense a little. “Jane-”

“Bar rules,” she reminds him, and he sighs, like he somehow hadn’t guessed that she’d invoke bar rules. They go out for drinks once a month, and their (unofficial, definitively illegal) rule is that they can talk about classified missions, as long as they’re quiet, careful, and use codes when they need to. It’s the one place that confidentiality doesn’t reach, not because it doesn’t matter but because they need it not to, just for a little while. They’re already keeping so many of their own secrets, what are a few of each other’s?

“Right,” Benji murmurs, and sets about fiddling with the scarf. Jane shifts closer, partly out of interest and partly to shield him from any prying eyes. She’s ready for it to be bad, but she can’t help the sharp breath she sucks in when she sees the ugly ring of old bruises around his neck. Ligature marks, rope burn, still not quite faded nearly three weeks after the fact.

“Strangulation,” Jane says, and it’s not a question.

Benji settles his scarf back around his neck. “Lane,” he says, and then, “I don’t much want to talk about it, honestly, but I figured I’d let you ask.”

Jane takes another drink of her beer, like that’s going to calm the sudden and very real rage she’s feeling. “Are we sure that letting him live isn’t too generous?”

“Oh, it’s generous,” Benji mutters, but reaches out with one hand and grabs Jane’s free hand, where it’s resting on the bar. Her fingers are trembling, and so are his, and he folds their hands together. “I’d shoot the bastard twice in each kneecap just to watch him bleed.”

“Guns, really,” she says, and squeezes his fingers where they’re curled around hers. “Don’t think that’s too quick?”

“I think I’d like to stop thinking about him at all, quickly.” Benji shrugs. “But he’s with MI-6.”

“And they’ll stop shuttling him around?”

“They’d better.”

Jane nods. She’d already been retired from the field by the time Ethan and Benji had first gone after Lane, but there had been no way to avoid the catastrophic fallout, the dissolution of the IMF. She’d trained CIA agents on going undercover for a while and held her tongue when they weren’t to her much higher standards, because it wasn’t like she had anywhere to go if she got fired. Brandt had been generous enough in getting her reassigned, and she got the sense that she hadn’t had much luck to push.

But Benji told her about the bomb in London. Not because of bar rules, but because he couldn’t sleep one night and needed someone who would stay up with him. Jane had listened as he told her in quiet, shaky breaths about Semtex and pressure triggers and the certainty that his last words wouldn’t even be his own. She hadn’t exactly been fond of Solomon Lane after that, and the strangulation isn’t exactly improving her opinion.

“Anyways!” Benji says with false brightness, and immediately downs the rest of his beer. He drops her hand in the process, and she pulls it back to grip her own beer, like maybe the glass will ground her somehow. “Let’s talk about something a little less dire. Something with a little less life-or-death. In fact, let’s talk about-”

“No,” Jane groans, before she can help it.

“Let’s talk about Zhen,” Benji practically sings.

Jane pouts at him, only because she knows it’ll make him laugh, and thankfully he does. “You only come here to talk about my crush.”

“And what a crush it is,” he chuckles.

He has a point. Jane has been training new agents with Zhen Lei since Zhen came back to the IMF; she hadn’t been as lucky as Jane to get a position with the CIA. Jane had known her by reputation only. She specialized in assault combat, and she had worked with Ethan once, which meant that Jane trusted her competence implicitly. It wasn’t until they had actually worked together that Jane had realized that Zhen was more than just competent. She was positively brilliant.

The problem is, it’s coming up on three years of friendship, and Jane still hasn’t exactly told Zhen any of this.

“You know what I think,” Benji says thoughtfully, and then, “Hold that thought,” as he waves at the bartender. Jane rolls her eyes and polishes off her bourbon, because she’s going to need another when Benji starts spouting bad romantic comedy plots at her like that’s any way to act. But she waits patiently, and Benji turns back to her, eyes positively dancing. It’s concerning. “I think you should woo her through sparring.”

“You’ve suggested that before,” Jane says, with all the confidence she can muster.

Benji’s eyebrows furrow. “I haven’t.”

“There’s no way that you have kept track-”

“You think I don’t keep track of-”

“We’ve been doing this once a month for three-”

“Oh my god,” Benji says suddenly, and loudly. A couple of people glance their way, and he leans in, suddenly hushed. “You’ve already tried it!”

“Benji,” she answers weakly, but the damage is absolutely done. She forgets sometimes that he isn’t just smart, he’s clever. And he isn’t just her friend, he’s probably her best friend, and that means he’s an incorrigible jackass.

“Jane,” Benji answers, breathtakingly sincere. “I’m proud of you.”

Jane groans. “That’s an indictment if I’ve ever heard one.”

“No, really!” The bartender sets down their drinks, and Benji offers a nod and a smile before turning back to Jane. “You thought of it before I did. How did it go?”

“I’m not sure,” Jane admits, swirling her beer in the bottle. “It’s only been a couple of days.”

“Did you beat her?”

“Two out of five matches.”

“That’s my girl,” Benji says, and clinks his bottle against hers. “D’you think she was impressed?”

“She was definitely impressed.”

“Then why are you not sure how it went?”

Jane shrugs. “In what world is beating a girl in a fight a way of telling her you’re interested?”

“It was your idea,” Benji points out, which is probably unfair because it was also his idea, but he has a point. “Has anything changed?”

“It’s not like we see each other much. If I’m off duty, that means she’s probably training.”

Benji rolls his eyes. “Right, because the IMF can’t have two people off duty at the same time.”

“Because then who do they call if there’s an emergency?” Jane mutters. Benji opens his mouth to respond, but before he can, there’s a high-pitched chirp sound.

Benji frowns. “Was that you?”

“I think it was, actually.” Jane opens her purse and reaches in for her phone - not her personal cell, but her work phone. It’s essentially a pager, and it’s essentially dead. She’s all but retired from field work, and even though all training agents are required to carry an emergency alert device with them, they almost never go off. But here’s hers, beeping at her.

“I didn’t know they did that,” Benji says, looking genuinely stunned.

Jane turns her phone over in her hands, considering. “It must be a real emergency if they’re calling me directly instead of going through some cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

“Well, sometimes you can’t help-” Benji stops as his own phone starts ringing. “A real emergency, you said?”

“You’d better answer that.”

Benji taps a few complicated-looking patterns on his screen and then lifts his phone, fumbling for his wallet with his other hand. “Go for Dunn.”

Jane takes the opportunity to actually read the alert. It’s as sparse as she expected: there’s a problem at the office, can you come in and take care of it, there’s travel involved. She’s already about to accept when she notices the signature at the end of the message.

“You’re kidding me,” Benji says faintly. “In the- really?”

Jane catches his eye and mouths: _Ethan?_ He nods and mouths back _Brandt,_ and Jane punches in her code to accept the mission.

“Well, the good news is, I’m already out with Jane,” Benji says. He finally wrestles a couple of bills out of his wallet and slaps them on the counter. “The bad news is we both took an Uber here, so you’ll need to send someone to pick us up.”

Jane’s work phone flashes white for a second before going black, and not lighting back up when she pushes any buttons. She glances at Benji, who seems completely unbothered by her technological woes. “Copy that, over and out.” He hangs up and looks at Jane expectantly. “Agent Faust will be here in two minutes to drive us to headquarters.”

“Agent Faust,” Jane repeats. On the record, she doesn’t know anything about Ilsa Faust; off the record, bar rules mean that she knows quite a bit about her. “Sounds like we’re getting a big team together.”

“You, me, her, Brandt, Ethan…” Benji shrugs, like this is something normal and not a sign that the world might be about to literally end, again. “Sounds like a good time.”

“A great time,” Jane says dryly, and gets to her feet. “Shall we?”

Benji loops his hand through her offered elbow. “Let’s,” he says, and together they set off for the door. The bar is crowded, and they take their time weaving through the people. “Ready to get back out there?”

“Not sure,” Jane says, not quite an admission but close. She’d tried field work after recovering from the gunshot in India, but nothing felt quite the same. Especially not without Trevor. “But I’ll feel better with you all there.”

“Ah, the power of a good team,” Benji says philosophically. “Especially a team where you’ve already saved each other’s lives more than once. Ilsa saved mine, y’know.”

“Did she?”

Benji tugs at his scarf with his free hand, and Jane can’t help but look away. “Cut me down.”

Jane takes a second to process that, and when it clicks she snaps her eyes back to Benji. “You mean you were-”

“Strangled vertically, yes, let’s not talk about it,” Benji says, with a little more urgency than he had before. “Let’s talk about- about--”

“About Ilsa,” Jane suggests. “You didn’t mention she was with the IMF now.”

“Officially, she’s not, it’s not like there’s much of an IMF to be with.”

“She was with some other agency, wasn’t she?”

“MI6, but she got out from under their thumb recently. And she’s going to be sticking around, because she and Ethan are...” He makes a wiggly, vague hand gesture.

Jane grins as they step outside, into the warm Virginia summer air. “She and Ethan?”

“She and Ethan,” Benji confirms. Somewhere in the distance, there are tires screeching. “That’ll be her, then.”

“Sounds like she drives like Ethan.”

Benji laughs as a sleek midsize car pulls up to a shuddering stop in front of them. “Match made in hell, those two.” He reaches forward and opens the back door. “After you.”

“Mmhm,” Jane says, and opens the passenger door. “You snooze, you lose.” Benji squawks indignantly, but she slips into the front seat and turns to face the driver.

Ilsa Faust lifts an eyebrow, but her eyes are sparkling. She doesn’t look as severe as Jane had expected, although she supposes everything she’s heard has been from Benji, and a lot of that involves some stone-cold badassery. “Agent Carter, I presume.”

“Agent Faust.” Jane smiles. “You can call me Jane. It’s lovely to meet you. I’ve officially heard nothing about you. But unofficially-”

“You can’t say things like that,” Benji complains as he shuts the back door. “Bar rules-”

“Yes, because I’m sure Ilsa is going to go directly to Acting Secretary Brandt and tell him that we talk about work over drinks sometimes. And I’m certain you and him have never done anything of the type.”

Ilsa smiles. “I like you already.”

“Yes, everyone likes everyone,” Benji says, and his seatbelt clicks into place. On instinct, Jane reaches for hers and buckles it. “Ilsa, do you know what’s-”

The rest of his sentence is drowned out as Ilsa guns the engine, which Jane has to assume was intentional. Benji knows it too, judging by the way he rolls his eyes and waits patiently for them to peel out of the parking lot. They’re moving much, much faster than the speed limit when he tries again. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Of course not,” Ilsa says blithely, turning the wrong way onto a one-way. “But I’m looking forward to finding out. So, Jane, how long have you worked with the IMF?”

“Long enough,” she mutters, and Benji snorts. “A handful of years at this point. I’m mostly retired from field work.”

“But you’re making an exception?”

Jane shrugs. There are any number of reasons - maybe she’s bored, maybe she’s worried about being rusty, maybe she wants to prove to herself that she’s still competent enough to train agents - but she goes for the one that feels the truest. “When Ethan Hunt calls…”

“Oh, you are preaching to the choir,” Benji says, and Ilsa actually laughs as she swerves onto a highway. “Jane, you might want to find something to hold onto.”

Jane snorts. “Why’s that?”

“Benji’s still not used to my driving,” Ilsa says like she’s confiding some great secret. When Jane glances back, Benji is gripping the handle above his seat, looking positively grim. “He thinks it’s dangerous.”

“You’re always driving like someone’s chasing after us,” Benji complains, and Ilsa makes a nearly-sideways lane change like she’s trying to prove his point. “We have speed limits for a reason!”

“We’re going to be at headquarters in half the time,” Jane points out. “And if this mission involves five people, it must be high priority.”

“Seven and counting, actually.” The speedometer ticks up a little higher, and Ilsa glances at Jane. “The three of us and Ethan, of course, and Agent Brandt, who called me.”

“Who are the other two?”

“Agent Stickell-”

“Please call him that to his face,” Benji says, looking dead serious. “Please, there’s nothing Luther loves more than being treated like some high-and-mighty agent.”

“And Brandt mentioned an assault combat specialist.”

“Assault combat,” Jane repeats. “Did he say-”

“It’s Zhen!” Benji crows from the back. Ilsa flicks her eyes to the roof of the car and back to the road in the most low-effort eye-roll Jane has ever seen; Benji ignores it. “Oh, this is going to be fantastic-”

“Because Agent Lei is a deeply capable agent,” Jane says, with all the withering patience she can muster, “and we should all trust her absolutely.”

Ilsa’s eyes dart up to the mirror to meet Benji’s. “What am I missing here?”

“Jane’s in love with her,” Benji says happily.

“Hey!” Jane snaps, feeling rather like Benji has just dumped ice water over her head. “Bar rules!”

“This isn’t bar rules, it’s not classified!”

“You don’t think this counts as classified?”

“I won’t repeat it,” Ilsa offers.

“Ilsa will follow bar rules,” Benji adds, sounding a little contrite now, which he should. And besides, Jane has only used the word “love” to describe Zhen when she was already pretty drunk, so he should feel bad. “Right, Ilsa?”

“Of course,” Ilsa says, and merges onto the exit ramp without slowing down at all. They hit a bump, and Jane’s pretty sure that there’s a moment where all four tires are off the ground. “We’re almost there.”

“Ilsa,” Jane says, “I like the way you drive. I don’t care what Benji says.”

“Yes, it’s essential that this car ride takes five minutes instead of ten,” Benji snaps. “It’s also essential that we all don’t _die horribly-_ ”

“None of us have yet,” Ilsa points out. “And we’ve all lived through worse.”

Benji goes quiet for a couple seconds, probably thinking about the varied and sundry ways he’s almost died. “But if I survive Kashmir and die because of your driving-”

“Then you have permission to haunt me,” Ilsa says sweetly, and Jane muffles her laugh with a fist as they swing into the parking lot at headquarters. “Look at that, we’re here in one piece.”

“I’ll consider it one piece as soon as we’re parked, thanks.”

Ilsa slides the car into a parking space and makes a point of turning to meet Benji’s eyes as she pulls the parking brake.

“Next time, Jane drives,” Benji says, and Ilsa rolls her eyes colossally. “We’d best get on the move.”

As soon as he’s out of the car, Ilsa looks at Jane and leans in. “Between you and me, I only drive like that because of him,” she whispers conspiratorially. “And I’ve driven in much riskier situations than nine o’clock on a Tuesday in the middle of Virginia.”

Jane carefully puts a hand on Ilsa’s knee; Ilsa doesn’t so much as twitch. “So have I. I think he just complains because he trusts you not to actually crash.”

“That makes absolutely no sense,” Ilsa says, but something about her seems a little lighter now. “I’ve heard a lot about you, you know. He and Brandt talk about you sometimes.”

“Benji talks about you too. Says great things, mostly.”

“That’s funny, he says the same about you.” Ilsa pauses, and her eyes flick to the windshield for a couple seconds. “Is that her?”

Jane barely has to glance over to see Zhen talking to Benji. Her heart doesn’t skip a beat at the sight of Zhen dressed in civvies for once, with her hair down around her shoulders. No, her breath doesn’t catch, that would be ridiculous. “That’s her.”

When she looks back, Ilsa is just barely smiling, like she understands some great secret. For a second, Jane desperately hopes that she does. “Ready to say hi?”

“Ready to get the mission,” Jane replies. Ilsa must read between the lines on that one, because she takes hold of Jane’s wrist and squeezes, just for a moment, before getting out of the car.

Jane takes her hand back and thinks about Budapest and Trevor, Ethan scaling a building in Dubai, Benji and Ilsa in Kashmir, Zhen in Shanghai in a mission she only ever really talks around. And she thinks about driving badly, just to prove the point of safety. Maybe it doesn’t make sense, but then again, what part of their work does?

She takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and pops her door open to grin at Zhen and Benji. “Well? What are we waiting for?”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr and Twitter @waveridden, or on Dreamwidth @harshlights.


End file.
